Timbuktu: City of Scholars

1. 0:06In 1327, when the Djinguereber Mosque was completed in Timbuktu, the University of Oxford had existed for fewer than 150 years. Paris had been [music] a university city for only two centuries, and yet in European textbooks, Africa remained [music]
2. 0:22blank. The desert, the darkness, nothing. It was not nothing. Timbuktu sat at the bend of the Niger River, at the point where the Saharan trade routes met the water roads of West Africa.
3. 0:35Founded around 1100 as a nomad camp, [music] it grew into one of the largest cities in the medieval world. At its height, it held 100,000 people. Arab merchants, >> [music] >> Tuareg traders, Berber scholars, Mandé poets and administrators. A cosmopolitan
4. 0:52city at the edge of the Sahara. Under Mansa Musa, it became something else entirely. The Sankore Mosque and its attached [music] schools formed what scholars now recognize as one of the world's first universities. 25,000
5. 1:06[music]
6. 1:06students in a city of 100,000.
7. 1:09They came from Egypt and Morocco and Andalusia and [music] the Arabian Peninsula. They came because Timbuktu was where knowledge lived. What they studied was the full breadth of a civilization at its height. Islamic sciences, mathematics and astronomy,
8. 1:23[music]
9. 1:23medicine and herbal practice, history and geography, law, the contracts that made trade possible across 1,000 kilometers, literature, linguistics and rhetoric. A curriculum that matched anything in Cairo or [music] Cordoba.
10. 1:38Between 300,000 and 700,000 manuscripts were produced in and around Timbuktu.
11. 1:44Written in Arabic, written in Ajami, African languages rendered in Arabic [music] script, a form of literacy that has no name in Western history books.
12. 1:54Manuscripts on theology and governance, on music theory and inheritance, on the stars and the body, personal letters and legal opinions preserved [music] in family libraries for seven centuries.
13. 2:06From the hajj, Musa had brought back more than divine credit. He brought back Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, a poet and architect from Granada, and put him to work rebuilding the face of the city.
14. 2:18The Djinguereber Mosque rose in 1327 [music] in the Sudano-Sahelian style.
15. 2:24Reddish-brown mud brick, wooden beams protruding from the walls like ribs, designed to be replastered [music] after every rainy season. It still stands. Musa reportedly paid al-Sahili [music] 200 kg of gold for his work.
16. 2:38This was not merely piety. It was architecture of power. A strong scholarly community legitimized his rule in the eyes of the wider Islamic world.
17. 2:48Merchants trusted Islamic law to enforce [music] contracts across vast distances.
18. 2:54Scholars from Baghdad brought with them the prestige of the entire Islamic civilization.
19. 2:59Musa was genuinely devout. [music] He was also a strategist. In 2012, jihadist groups occupied Timbuktu. The staff of the Ahmed Baba Institute [music] loaded foot lockers in the middle of the night and moved 350,000 manuscripts south [music] to Bamako by
20. 3:17hand, in secret, over several weeks. The manuscripts were saved. They are still being translated. Most have never been studied. They wait. What is written in them matters, not because they prove that Africa had a civilization. That was
21. 3:33never honestly in question, but because they are the voices of people who wrote, who thought, who argued, who asked questions across 700 years, and the questions are still open.

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